Soul’s Code

A mother’s death, a search for a soulmate and a spiritual journey made this year an epic reckoning

BY KAREN BLACK — By this age, I had hoped to have . . . call it a supportive partner. Call it a soul-mate. Call it whatever you want.

Yet, here I am: single, never married, holding my mother’s hands, whose tips are numb from chemo.

I never planned to do this part of life alone.

The Eckhart Tolle of Europe asks us a question: Why don’t we really like change?

BY TONY SAMARA — We each have an ego. And that busy ego plugs into, let’s call it, control systems.

Yes, we do have what the enlightenment philosophers called free will but we seem to make this choice every day. It’s an unconscious choice.

Control systems compromise the free aspect of ourselves. They always want things to be the same way — in the words of the 1980′s band the Talking Heads sang — the same as it ever was.

Secrets of a real-life horse whisperer

BY JENNIFER SCALIA  — If we conduct a collective check-in on how we relate to animals, some of Hollywood is a barometer. Birds, as in Hitchcock’s 1963 film with Tippi Hedren, may be feared. Rats (Willard) and snakes (Samuel Jackson) are to be loathed.

But horses, from Gladiator to Westerns to the Horse Whisperer, deserve our love.

I had never learned to ride a horse before doing healing work with this species that bred movie stars but I saw the Robert Redford movie and loved the book by Nicholas Evans — one of the few I could actually get myself to read back then.

Our evolutionary origins lie in Africa. We share 98% of our DNA with chimps. A peak experience and political story about a chimp in Africa.

BY G. PASCAL ZACHARY — There’s a collective code that asks Christians to be their brother’s keeper.  Buddhists go a step deeper, and embrace a first principle that we are not distinct entities at all but plot-points along a continuum of being called consciousness.

Well, I’m Jewish. And I’m a secular one at that. So a code that I go to is Darwin’s intersection with DNA.

Fitness celebs and marketing campaigns are out to hook you. Here are a couple of athelete-driven, mind-body movements.

BY SOUL’S CODE — If you’re going to get hooked on anything, it might as well be on healing habits for your mind and body.

We introduced you to emerging techniques like Chi Running. We handicapped cardio-dance trends like 5Rhythms and the S-Factor.

Ya, we know, Zumba won! Ten million Americans now do Zumba every week — and every major gym chain in the country sends Colombian-born Alberto Perez’s Zumba Fitness Inc. a royalty payment for those classes.

But here is our question: Will one of these (below) be the next Zumba, or pilates, or workout to break out?

Will Baby Boomers choose to expire in hospitals and nursing homes? Or will they take matters into their own hands?

BY DAVID RICKEY —  Would you prefer to die on purpose — or with purpose?

Late, great writers like Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon), Ernest Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls) and counter-culture figure Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) were larger than life.

Yet they each took their own lives — rather than let the life coded into their respective DNA take its course.

The most timely example: Tony Scott (above, center), a Hollywood producer and director who jumped off an 18-storey L.A. bridge that he’d once scouted as a location for a movie.

The Baby Boomers are the biggest generation in American history, the most vain-glorious generation — and also the most afraid of pain, if Prozac and painkiller prescriptions are any indication.

What does the 44th President, his family and friends really believe in — that is, beyond politics?

BY SOUL’S CODE — Barack Obama is the personification of this site’s meme, “spiritual but not religious.”

On matter’s of faith, it’s what makes it so easy for pundits to spin his story from both the fundamentalist right and the agnostic left.

Exhibit: A documentary released during the 2012 presidential election cycle, 2016: Obama’s America (links to free streaming here), suggested that our 44th president is an anti-Christian, anti-colonialist.

From the left: Liberal comedian and million-dollar Obama donor, Bill Maher, routinely says he hopes the prez is lying when he espouses his Christian credentials.

Test your spiritual knowledge about our president by clicking on the multiple-choice answers below:

From Stephen Hawking to Steve Jobs, big minds have changed your life. The saying goes that theses geniuses are born with a good-luck gene . . . or are they?

SOUL’S CODE — Every parent in America wants their kid to be the next gal or guy who changes the world.

But some of the people who actually did change our lives led extremely painful lives themselves, beyond their controllable lifestyle choices.

So we ask: Would you wish the genius gene upon your kids, or just as well leave that DNA alone?

Click on the radio buttons below to see what the likes of Oprah, Arthur Schopenhauer and Obama share in common — or not:

On the butt end of bullying? A spiritual argument against turning the other cheek.

BY JIM BOUCHARD – What if you could look inside the soul of a bully? What would you find?

Conventional wisdom says that the bully is insecure. He finds some sense of power and control in the world by using force to get his way. He’s often the progeny of a bully himself, was raised to bully others or at least knows no other way.

What others thought of me on the outside, mattered. My true make-over happened on the inside.

BY JENNIFER SCALIA — I am an American-born woman, raised — and still living in — the near-geographical center of the continental U.S.

St. Louis is my home, and is always on the move (a transportation hub for the country . . . no wonder the biggest moving company in the world, United Van Lines, is headquartered here).

My family? Literally middle America.

In this time and place — actually, it was ’97 (wow, that seems so long ago) — I somehow conceived that I had a “small” physical imperfection in my upper-body that needed an amendment.